CDP Institute

We’re all about trends today, Dear Reader. Data clean rooms are trendy, and ActionIQ is jumping aboard through a strategic partnership with data clean room platform InfoSum. The deal will let ActionIQ clients match their data against other companies’ information and store the enhanced results. InfoSum’s claim to fame is it does this without making copies of the original data.

Testing software before you buy it is trendier. Demostack makes it easier for Software-as-a-Service companies to create demonstrations and demo environments. They just raised a $34 million Series B, bringing total funding to $51.5 million.

Buying through social platforms is the trendiest.  Flowspace reports it’s a high priority for 27% of companies and 71% report a higher ROI than other channels.  Less expected: nearly as many cited data ownership (43%) as acquisitions (45%) as their main reason for doing social commence.  CDPs were actually the most common investment (55%) for improving social commerce fulfillment.

Just in case you haven’t seen enough bad news recently, spam is getting worse, too.  This summary from Axios reports that spam email rose 30% from 2020 to 2021, spam phone calls hit a six month high in March, and spam texts nearly doubled since last June.   Sorry.

I’m not sure whether this is good news or bad: a federal appellate court has reaffirmed its ruling that data scraping from public profiles on LinkedIn is legal.  Privacy advocates and data owners might be unhappy, but researchers and archivists are now on firmer legal ground.  The decision follows a Supreme Court ruling that limited the protections of anti-hacking laws.

This one is good news for sales managers, although phone agents might disagree.  Zoom has released an AI tool that analyzes sales conversations to extract useful, structured information and create metrics such as how often salespeople ask engaging questions and provide next steps, and how long they talk.  The feature, Zoom IQ for Sales, can also pull in data from Salesforce to give a more complete view of on-going client conversations.